At about 7:30 p.m. that Thursday evening, Galfield and Lottie began to argue loudly about which TV program they wanted to see.

By 8:30 p.m., Lottie pulled out a piece of metal. A Denver Post article quoted jail Capt. Charles Murrell as saying that Lottie had previously pried a piece of metal off of his lower bunk bed and sharpened it into a shank. But Lottie said he got the shank from someone else.

He thrust the shank into Galfield’s left shoulder, according to a Denver Post article. Lottie said Galfield had put soap bars in a sock and was swinging it at him. Only then did he stab Galfield in the shoulder, he said.

Galfield pummeled Lottie in the face, according to Murrell. Lottie said he got a concussion. Jail officers separated the men, who were both taken to Denver General Hospital, now named Denver Health Medical Center, for treatment of minor injuries.

Lottie’s murder trial began on Tuesday, Feb. 22, 1977. Denver District Judge John Brooks presided. It took two weeks to select a jury consisting of six men and six women in the case that had been widely publicized.

On the second day of the trial, a detective testified that Lottie’s fingerprints were discovered on the broken front door and the bathroom door.

Snell was not called as a witness in the trial. He said he could have explained what Bell had told him about the threats and assaults and how they had met through her estranged husband John Bell when the two were cellmates.

In a Friday phone interview, Lottie denied ever being an acquaintance of Bell’s husband.

“I didn’t know him,” he said.

On March 7, 1977, Prosecutor David Thomas told jurors during closing arguments that Lottie’s fingerprints linked him to the crime. He also mentioned the prior knife assaults.

“There was no motive as clear as Ned Lottie’s,” former Denver Post reporter Cindy Parmenter quoted Thomas as saying.

Lottie’s attorney Ralph Rhodes argued, however, that Bell was a prostitute who had many enemies.

“Patricia Bell was a unique individual who could get into more trouble than anyone I’ve ever seen,” Rhodes said in his closing statement, adding that another of Bell’s acquaintances had also threatened to kill her. He told her shortly before her death that, “‘If you leave me, I’ll kill you.'”

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.